American Merchant Ships and Sailors

by Willis J. Abbot

Most of these are engaged in coastwise trade. The fleet of the Hamburg-American line alone, among our many foreign rivals, aggregates 515,628 gross tons.

However, we must bear in mind that this seemingly insignificant place held by the United States merchant marine represents only the part it holds in the international carrying trade of the world. Such a country as Germany must expend all its maritime energies on international trade. It has little or no river and coastwise traffic. But the United States is a little world in itself; not so very small, and of late years growing greater. Our wide extended coasts on Atlantic, Pacific, and the Mexican Gulf, are bordered by rich States crowded with a people who produce and consume more per capita than any other race. From the oceans great navigable rivers, deep bays, and placid sounds, extend into the very heart of the country. The Great Lakes are bordered by States more populous and cities more busy and enterprising than those, which in the proudest days of Rome, and Carthage and Venice skirted the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The traffic of all these trade highways is by legislation reserved for American ships alone. On the Great Lakes has sprung up a merchant marine rivaling that of some of the foremost maritime peoples, and conducting a traffic that puts to shame the busiest maritime highways of Europe. Long Island Sound bears on its placid bosom steamships that are the marvel of the traveling public the world over. The Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, are all great arteries through which the life current of trade is ceaselessly flowing. A book might be written on the one subject of the part that river navigation has played in developing the interior States of this Union. Another could well be devoted to the history of lake navigation, which it is no overstatement to pronounce the most impressive chapter in the history of the American merchant marine. In this volume, however, but brief attention can be given to either.

The figures show how honorably our whole body of shipping compares in volume to that operated by any maritime people. Our total registered shipping engaged in the fisheries, coastwise, and lake traffic, and foreign trade numbered at the beginning of 1902, 24,057 vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of 5,524,218 tons. In domestic trade alone we had 4,582,683 tons, or an amount exceeding the total tonnage of Germany and Norway combined, or of Germany and France. Only England excelled us, but her lead, which in 1860 was inconsiderable, in 1901 was prodigious; the British flag flying over no less than 14,261,254 tons of shipping, more than three times our tonnage! It is proper to note that more than two-thirds of our registered tonnage is of wood.

I have already given reasons why, in the natural course of things, this disparity between the American and the British foreign-going merchant marine will not long continue. And indeed, as this book is writing, it is apparent that its end is near. Though shipyards have multiplied fast in the last five years of the nineteenth century, the first years of the new century found them all occupied up to the very limit of their capacity. Yards that began, like the Cramps, building United States warships and finding little other work, were soon under contract to build men-of-war for Russia and Japan. The interest of the people in the navy afforded a great stimulus to shipbuilding. It is told of one of the principal yards, that its promotor went to Washington with a bid for naval construction in his pocket, but without either a shipyard or capital wherewith to build one. He secured a contract for two ships, and capital readily interested itself in his project. When that contract is out of the way the yard will enter the business of building merchant vessels, just as several yards, which long had their only support from naval contracts, are now doing. There were built in the year ending June 30, 1901, in American yards, 112 vessels of over 1000 tons each, or a total of 311,778. Many of these were lake vessels; some were wooden ships. Of modern steel steamers, built on the seaboard, there were but sixteen. At the present moment there are building in American yards, or contracted for, almost 255,325 tons of steel steamships, to be launched within a year—or 89 vessels, more than twice the output of any year in our history, and an impressive earnest for the future. Nor is this rapid increase in the ship-building activity of the United States accompanied by any reduction in the wages of the American working men. Their high wages, of which ship-builders complain, and in which everyone else rejoices, remain high. But it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction, even of foreign observers, that the highly-paid American labor is the most effective, and in the end the cheapest. Our workingmen know how to use modern tools, to make compressed air, steam, electricity do their work at every possible point, and while the United States still ranks far below England as a ship-building center, Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen are coming over here to learn how we build the ships that we do build. If it has not yet been demonstrated that we can build ships as cheaply as any other nation, we are so near the point of demonstration, that it may be said to be expected momentarily. With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of ship-building is a matter of the immediate future. A picturesque illustration of this change is afforded by the fact that in 1894 the plates of the "Dirigo," the first steel square-rigged vessel built in the United States, were imported from England. In 1898 we exported to England some of the plates for the "Oceanic," the largest vessel built to that time.

Even the glory, such as it may be, of building the biggest ship of the time is now well within the grasp of the United States. At this writing, indeed, the biggest ship is the "Celtic," British built, and of 20,000 tons. But the distinction is only briefly for her, for at New London, Connecticut, two ponderous iron fabrics are rising on the ways that presently shall take form as ocean steamships of 25,000 tons each, to fly the American flag, and to ply between Seattle and China. These great ships afford new illustrations of more than one point already made in this chapter. To begin with they are, of course, not constructed for any individual owner. Time was that the farmer with land sloping down to New London would put in his spare time building a staunch schooner of 200 tons, man her with his neighbors, and engage for himself in the world's carrying trade. It is rather different now. The Northern Pacific railroad directors concluded that their railroad could not be developed to its fullest earning capacity without some way of carrying to the markets of the far East the agricultural products gathered up along its line. As the tendency of the times is toward gathering all branches of a business under one control, they determined to not rely upon independent shipowners, but to build their own vessels. That meant the immediate letting of a contract for $5,000,000 worth of ship construction, and that in turn meant that there was a profit to somebody in starting an entirely new shipyard to do the work. So, suddenly, one of the sleepiest little towns in New England, Groton, opposite New London, was turned into a ship-building port. The two great Northern Pacific ships will be launched about the time this book is published, but the yard by that time will have become a permanent addition to the ship-building enterprises of the United States. So, too, all along the Atlantic coast, we find ancient shipyards where, in the very earliest colonial days, wooden vessels were built, adapting themselves to the construction of the new steel steamships.

How wonderful is the contrast between the twentieth century, steel, triple-screw, 25,000-ton, electric-lighted, 25-knot steamship, and Winthrop's little "Blessing of the Bay," or Fulton's "Clermont," or even the ships of the Collins line—floating palaces as they were called at the time! Time has made commonplace the proportions of the "Great Eastern," the marine marvel not only of her age, but of the forty years that succeeded her breaking-up as impracticable on account of size. She was 19,000 tons, 690 feet long, and built with both paddle-wheels and a screw. The "Celtic" is 700 feet long, 20,000 tons, with twin screws. The one was too big to be commercially valuable, the other has held the record for size only for a year, being already outclassed by the Northern Pacific 25,000-ton monsters. That one was a failure, the other a success, is almost wholly due to the improvements in engines, which effect economy of space both in the engine-room and in the coal bunkers. It is, by the way, rather a curious illustration of the growing luxury of life, and of ocean travel, that the first voyage of this enormous ship was made as a yacht, carrying a party of pleasure-seekers, with not a pound of cargo, through the show places of the Mediterranean.

It will be interesting to chronicle here some of the characteristics of the most modern of ocean steamships, and to show by the use of some figures, the enormous proportions to which their business has attained. For this purpose it will be necessary to use figures drawn from the records of foreign lines, and from such vessels as the "Deutschland" and the "Celtic," although the purpose of this book is to tell the story of the American merchant marine. But the figures given will be approximately correct for the great American ships now building, while there are not at present in service any American passenger ships which are fairly representative of the twentieth century liner.

The "Celtic," for example, will carry 3,294 persons, of whom 2,859 will be passengers. That is, it could furnish comfortable accommodations, heated and lighted, with ample food for all the students in Harvard University, or the University of Michigan, or Columbia University, or all in Amherst, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams combined. If stood on end she would almost attain the height of the Washington monument placed on the roof of the Capitol at Washington. She has nine decks, and a few years ago, if converted into a shore edifice, might fairly have been reckoned in the "skyscraper" class. Her speed, as she was built primarily for capacity is only about seventeen knots, and to attain that she burns about 260 tons of coal a day. The "Deutschland," which holds the ocean record for speed, burns nearly 600 tons of coal a day, and with it carries through the seas only 16,000 tons as against the "Celtic's" 20,000. But she is one of the modern vessels built especially to carry passengers. In her hold, huge as it is, there is room for only about 600 tons of cargo, and she seldom carries more than one-sixth of that amount. One voyage of this great ship costs about $45,000, and even at that heavy expense, she is a profit earner, so great is the volume of transatlantic travel and so ready are people to pay for speed and luxury. Her coal alone costs $5,000 a trip, and the expenses of the table, laundry, etc., equal those of the most luxurious hotel.